Service Expanding on East River Ferry Route to Wall Street

By RANDY KENNEDY

Published: November 14, 2002

In an effort to relieve crowding on the jammed Lexington Avenue subways and ease commuting to Lower Manhattan, the Port Authority will use federal emergency money to increase ferry service on the East River beginning Monday, officials said yesterday.

New York Waterway, a private company that has operated an hourly East River service used mostly by Merrill Lynch employees since shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, was chosen to expand that service to every 15 minutes, using three boats that will run weekdays from East 90th Street to East 34th Street and Pier 11 near Wall Street. Return trips will be on the same schedule.

The route will join others, from Hoboken, N.J., and from Hunters Point in Long Island City, that have been subsidized by the Federal Emergency Management Agency over the last several months, as ferries have rapidly emerged as a more important part of the city's transportation network.

Before the terrorist attacks, New York Waterway, the largest ferry operator around the city, had been making plans to begin limited East River service and test demand for it. After the attacks, the company entered into an agreement with Merrill Lynch to provide hourly ferries to help the brokerage firm's employees and other New Yorkers commute more easily to Lower Manhattan.

Officials from the city, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and the federal government now want to see whether more frequent service will draw substantially more riders and become a waterborne alternative to the Lexington Avenue lines, the Nos. 4, 5 and 6, which are among the most crowded in the city.

Pat Smith, a spokesman for New York Waterway, said the company had more than doubled its ridership since Sept. 11, 2001, to more than 65,000 one-way trips a day.

The federal emergency agency will commit about $350,000 a month to the new service, to be operated with three 97-passenger boats that can make the trip from East 90th Street to Pier 11 in about 20 minutes. (An earlier East River experiment by New York Waterway in 1996 used much bigger boats that took about 35 minutes for the trip.)

Port Authority officials said that, as with other subsidized ferry service, the federal help would be offset by passenger revenue, so that if the route becomes heavily used the subsidy would drop accordingly. The federal money will be made available for up to nine months, said Steve Coleman, a Port Authority spokesman, who added that the agency would closely monitor the new ferry service. ''If we review it,'' he said, ''and it turns out not to be successful, then we'll make changes.''

Two companies -- New York Waterway and New York Water Taxi, a recent startup -- competed for approval to operate the subsidized East River service. Mr. Coleman said that New York Waterway was chosen because it was better prepared to run the route and its proposed costs were more competitive.

Starting at 6 a.m. on Monday, ferries will depart every 15 minutes during morning and evening rush hours -- 6 a.m. to 10 a.m., and 3 p.m. to 7 p.m., and every 30 minutes off-peak, until 10 p.m. The service will be free for the first week, and after that the basic fare will be $5 for a one-way trip to Lower Manhattan.

Schedules and fares can be found at www.nywaterway.com.

Arthur E. Imperatore Jr., the president of New York Waterway, said the hourly East River service now carries about 250 riders a day to the tip of Lower Manhattan. If the more frequent service attracted about four times that, or 1,000 riders, he said he believed it could be self-sustaining.